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My recent assignment is to model a multi-user geodatabase for the whole world using the ESRI platform. This geodatabase contains administrative layers and topographic layers. The schema is to be designed in such a way that users can update different countries simultaneously.

My first problem is that every country has different administrative structures. For example, Country A has 2 administrative levels, Country B has 3 administrative levels and Country C has again 2 administrative levels.

Now when I merge each set of admin levels into layers (i.e. all level 1 areas in one layer, level 2 in a second layer and level 3 in a third layer) and establish a topology there is a gap between Country C and Countries A and B in admin level 3 because that level is not available in Countries A and B. The goal is for the topology to not have a gap.

Am I organizing this data in the wrong way?

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You should start here. geodatabase data models

There are some very efficient models for government administration boundaries here.
Basemap models

Many disciplines have models linked here.
Data Models

And a national template here.
GIS for the Nation

This is world level.

http://resources.arcgis.com/content/basemap-data-model

political boundaries

Will these work?

Political boundaries global

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  • Thanks for reply, I have already gone through them unfortunately every thing explains or available in data model is related to one country only. There is no example/datamodel available for world level. Commented Jan 26, 2011 at 15:56
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There is a significant amount of discussion on this in the OpenStreetMap Community. You might want to search the tagging and users list.

Here is a link to that admin_level tag used to classify administrative boundaries: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:admin_level#admin_level

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Perhaps you could use a organized fashion and create the missing polygons for each country?

That way you will known that a specific level is not used by administration.

Example:

Countries States Macro-regions Micro-regions City Districts Neighborhoods

Country A and Country B

They'll both have the Country geometry. But country B does not have macro-regions or micro-regions. just create a big polygon (same as the up-level) and mark it as not applicable.

If you were customizing ArcGIS that would be "easier" to accomplish with class extensions and a little modelling, as you could create a metamodel and tell the extension how to validate each country, based on a separate "structure" table.

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